From my past work

My career started our as a post-doc researcher working on European housing policy issues in the 1980s. On the surface this is very different from the healthcare innovation questions I am involved in now, but there are two threads running through most of my research activities.

First, the 1980s was a time a major change in housing provision, with a decline in social housing models and a rise in market solutions, prompting a major academic debate about the nature of ‘privatisation’ or the ‘recommodification’ of public housing systems – what it meant, how it was being played out across different countries.

Second, it was clear that there were important differences in the efficiencies of housing systems – their ability to control costs and prices and generally ensure that the population was able to access decent housing. These were partly related to the regulatory and institutional context for housing provision, a context which also had implications for the way the housebuilding industry operated – its processes, how profits were made and how innovative it was. Of course, all this is still the case today and these are still being rehearsed in the UK in 2016, where there is grave concern about the state of housing provision and lack of coherent policy to manage it.

We could replace the word ‘housing’ in the two paragraphs above with ‘healthcare’ and they could represent a description of many of the issues facing contemporary health systems – where the draw the boundaries between public and private provision, how to ensure the regulatory and institutional frameworks manage the system, how to ensure access to the best possible healthcare for all, how to use innovation to improve processes and efficiency.

There is, however, a specific bridge between part 1 of my post-doc career – housing policy – and part 2, on healthcare innovation. In the mid-1990s I started looking at the concept of ‘smart homes’, where information and communications technology is used to help control the functions of the home. One project involved building two smart homes for elderly and disabled people, in York and Edinburgh, and from this my interest in the then-embryonic concept of ‘telecare’ sprang.

One other area I worked on in the 1990s has now returned, in the healthcare context. We carried out one of the earliest studies of ‘partnering’ in the construction industry, the use of collaborative relationships between clients and suppliers, coupled with risk and reward sharing mechanisms. This study ended with a few tentative conclusions about the then new concept of public-private partnerships (the UK’s PFI, Private Finance Initiative). At the time, we couldn’t have foreseen that PFI would be such an important concept in hospital construction.

Some publications on housing and construction:

James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki. Building mass customised housing through innovation in the production system: lessons from Japan. Environment and Planning A, 2005, 37(1): 9-20.